------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
*Clinton Welcomes Frail Vajpayee to White House
*Clinton, Vajpayee Pledge Stronger U.S.-Indian Ties
*Vilifying Pakistan
*SADDAM'S SABER-RATTLING
*Saddam warned not to repeat past actions
*Russians Not Paying for Electricity
*Is Another Energy Crisis Ahead?
*Guilty Plea, Release Leave Unresolved Questions in Lee Case
*. . . Secrecy on Trial
*In the Wake of Wen Ho Lee . . .
*The Prosecution of Wen Ho Lee
*Bush, Gore differ on global role
*The Museum of the American Century
MILITARY
*Western Leaders Face Trial in Belgrade Monday
*U.N. Forsakes Effort to Curb Poppy Growth
*Two Hundred Rebels Surrender in India
*S. Korea to start work on railway to North
*War Has No Rules for Russian Forces
*Ex-POW's identity may have been discovered
*Space Station Astronauts Install Treadmill in Orbit
*An International Court
*After the tank
*Taking the pilot out of the cockpit
*Abrams M1A2 Tank
*The Army will give J.C. Slaughter an honorable discharge
OTHER
*The seven-turbine, 11.5-megawatt Madison Wind Project
*The Chesapeake Bay Foundation suit against the federal government
*Rich Nations Pledge to Double Countries Getting Debt Relief
*Now that's a model prisoner
*Investigation of Ex-Chief of the C.I.A. Is Broadened
*U.S. acquires reputed terrorism guide
ACTIVISTS
*Farm Aid cause continues with weekend events, concert
*Farm Aid Cause Continues with Sunday Concert
*Gandhi Likeness Unveiled by Clinton
*
-------- NUCLEAR (by country)
-------- india / pakistan
Clinton Welcomes Frail Vajpayee to White House
Yahoo News
Friday September 15
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000915/ts/india_usa_dc_5.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Clinton (news - web sites) on Friday welcomed a frail looking Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to the White House for talks on nuclear tensions in South Asia and economic and social cooperation.
In an abbreviated welcoming ceremony on the South Lawn, which dispensed with the customary review of troops in a nod to Vajpayee's health, Clinton vowed to work with Vajpayee to seek peace in South Asia.
``We will talk about our common interests in slowing the spread of nuclear weapons, and the broader consequences of proliferation in South Asia,'' Clinton said after a 19-gun salute.
``At the same time, we welcome India's commitment to forego nuclear testing until the treaty banning all nuclear testing comes into force.''
Clinton said he and Vajpayee would also discuss areas where the United States and India need to work together to fight AIDS (news - web sites), reduce poverty, protect the global environment and open up the global economy.
``No matter our differences -- and two such large and diverse countries will always have some differences ... if we speak with care and listen with respect, we will find common ground and achieve common aims,'' Clinton said.
Vajpayee said talks would focus on economic cooperation, science and technology as well as a discussion on regional and global issues.
``This is a time of new hope and new opportunities in Indian-American ties,'' he said.
The White House said earlier it had canceled a joint news conference with Clinton and Vajpayee at the Indian government's request because of the premier's poor health.
The 73-year-old prime minister's health has been the subject of media speculation since he cut short his stay at a party convention last month because of pain in his knees. Vajpayee is due to have knee replacement surgery after returning from the United States.
Vajpayee trimmed his two-week visit to the United States by two days on the advice of doctors, forcing him to skip a scheduled stopover in San Francisco.
Clinton will host an official dinner for the Indian prime minister on Sunday at the White House.
---
Clinton, Vajpayee Pledge Stronger U.S.-Indian Ties
Yahoo News
Friday September 15
By Steve Holland
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000915/ts/india_usa_dc.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Clinton (news - web sites) and a frail-looking Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee held talks on Friday on nuclear tensions in South Asia and ways to develop the long-term relationship between their countries.
``I think we have worked hard together to move our relationship from one of too little contact and too much suspicion to one of genuine efforts to build a long-term partnership that is in the interest of the people of India and the people of the United States,'' Clinton said.
Clinton and Vajpayee met for more than an hour in the Oval Office. The Indian leader's visit came six months after Clinton made his own trek to India. That trip warmed ties after a long chill rooted in Cold War tensions.
Vajpayee's apparent frail health overshadowed his four-day official visit, which is to conclude on Sunday night with a White House dinner in his honor.
A welcoming ceremony on the White House South Lawn was abbreviated and an afternoon joint news conference was canceled. Addressing reporters in the Oval Office during a picture-taking session, Vajpayee interrupted his comments with long pauses.
``With your visit to India, a beginning has already been made,'' Vajpayee told Clinton. ``We have to pursue that path.''
The 73-year-old prime minister's health has been the subject of media speculation since he cut short his stay at a party convention last month because of pain in his knees. Vajpayee is due to have knee replacement surgery after returning from the United States.
Vajpayee trimmed his two-week visit to the United States by two days on the advice of doctors, forcing him to skip a scheduled stopover in San Francisco.
Clinton vowed to work with Vajpayee to seek peace in South Asia. Earlier this year he called South Asia possibly the world's most dangerous place because of nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan and their clashes over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.
``We will talk about our common interests in slowing the spread of nuclear weapons, and the broader consequences of proliferation in South Asia,'' Clinton said during the welcoming ceremony. ``At the same time, we welcome India's commitment to forego nuclear testing until the treaty banning all nuclear testing comes into force.''
Clinton said he and Vajpayee would also discuss areas where the United States and India need to work together to fight AIDS (news - web sites), reduce poverty, protect the global environment and open up the global economy.
``No matter our differences -- and two such large and diverse countries will always have some differences -- if we speak with care and listen with respect, we will find common ground and achieve common aims,'' Clinton said.
Vajpayee said talks would focus on economic cooperation, science and technology as well as a discussion of regional and global issues.
---
Vilifying Pakistan
Washington Post
Monday, September 18, 2000 ; A19
By Robert McFarlane
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25622-2000Sep17.html
For those who have followed events in South Asia over the past 50 years it is painful to see a long-time friend and ally being unfairly demonized ["Up the Ante on Pakistan," op-ed, Sept. 11]. For Arthur H. Davis to blame Pakistan for turmoil in that region and to call for its designation as a "terrorist state" is perverse and unjustified under any rational analysis of the facts. Worse, it contributes to polarization at a time when our country needs to engage both India and Pakistan in a sustained trialogue founded on goodwill and objectivity.
Recently I met with Pakistan's chief executive, General Pervez Musharraf, in New York. Having met with each of his elected predecessors on many occasions in the past 15 years, I can say that he stands well above them in terms of honesty and integrity and a devotion to seeking peace and elevating the welfare of the Pakistani people.
In our meeting he reaffirmed his wish to conclude a negotiated peace with India in Kashmir and talked in detail about his strategy for achieving political and economic reform in Pakistan. Indeed, much already has been achieved toward these ends and much more can be done under his stewardship with encouragement and modest support from the United States and others.
Our discussion of Kashmir focused on the presence of a half- million Indian troops in the valley and the decade-long struggle by the Kashmiris, who face humiliation and oppression on a daily basis. Musharraf assured me that Pakistan wants a peaceful solution to this desperate situation, one that respects the wishes of the Kashmiri people. If India truly respects international norms and democratic principles and acts on its earlier commitment to uphold the 1949 United Nations Security Council resolution prescribing a plebiscite for the Kashmiris to decide on accession to India or Pakistan, Musharraf surely will endorse the outcome.
Six weeks ago, a leading guerrilla group in Kashmir, the Hizbul Mujaheddin, proposed a three-month cease-fire in a genuine effort to move the struggle from the battlefield to negotiations. To his credit, the response of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was encouraging and offered a dialogue based on insaniyat (humanity). Regrettably, at the insistence of his hard-line partisans, the terms for talks escalated to include the precondition that any negotiations be held within the framework of the Indian constitution. To ask Kashmiris to accept the Indian constitution is to preempt the purpose of talks: to achieve a solution that meets the aspirations of the Kashmiri people in accordance with the U.N. resolution.
The United States has important interests in South Asia. With respect to Pakistan, our interests go beyond support for a staunch ally in the Cold War--an ally who made enormous sacrifices measured in lives, the displacement of more than 3 million refugees, and the spawning of a ruinous drug trade from Afghanistan. Since that victory, we have essentially dismissed that sacrifice.
Both Pakistan and India could someday benefit enormously as the avenue of commerce for bringing the wealth of central Asia to market in Europe and Japan. As for our interests in India, nurturing the successful development of the world's largest democracy needs no further elaboration.
For these interests to be advanced, however, the United States must be--and be seen to be--a firm and objective friend to both countries. The so-called new economy is passing these countries by. Without our help they both risk becoming failed states. Sanctions and shrill rhetoric get us nowhere. It is time for the United States to lead on this matter.
The writer was national security adviser to President Reagan from October 1983 to December 1985.
-------- iraq
SADDAM'S SABER-RATTLING
New York Post
Sunday, September 17, 2000
By URI DAN
http://www.nypost.com/09172000/commentary/10822.htm
SADDAM HUSSEIN is roaring again, charging Kuwait with "stealing Iraqi oil" by pumping it from rich fields near their mutual border.
Kuwait angrily replied to Saddam's charge last week that Kuwait couldn't steal what belonged to Kuwait, and blamed Iraq of trying to trigger another Persian Gulf crisis - just as oil prices are on the rise.
Since Saddam made similar accusations prior to his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, his verbal belligerence set off alarms across the Mideast. U.S. and Israeli intelligence have been closely following his steps.
The latest official report to the Israeli foreign office indicates it is no longer clear who really runs Iraq:
"Saddam is ill, allegedly with lymphatic cancer, and has appointed a family council headed by his son Koussai.
"Recently, Saddam lost his ability to concentrate, and his personal aide, Abed Hamoud, directs daily matters of state," the report said.
It also emphasized that, regardless of who's in charge, Iraq has been refusing to allow U.N. arms inspectors on its territory - aided by France, which supports Baghdad's claim "that the inspection team is not yet prepared to carry out its mission - although it is well prepared."
Last week, I asked Prime Minister Ehud Barak's chief of staff, Danni Yatom, what's keeping the inspectors out of Iraq.
"Saddam rejects the idea, and he's backed by France and Russia," was the reply.
He added that Iraq was also helped when the former American arms inspector Scott Ritter "surprisingly" changed his mind and defended Saddam.
Since the last U.S. and British bombing of Iraq in December 1998, there have been no arms inspections - allowing Saddam to continue a secret effort to rebuild his arsenal with ground-to-ground Housseini missiles.
These long-range weapons are described as improved versions of the Scud missiles that Saddam used against Israel during the Gulf War.
Saddam also has been secretly buying material in Europe and Russia to develop nuclear-arms capability.
Even Slobodan Milosevic is helping him: Yugoslav missile experts visited Baghdad in July.
Milosevic's ties to Saddam go back a long time and, according to intelligence reports, during last year's NATO bombing campaign, the Yugoslav leader got advice from Saddam on how to weather the raids.
Israeli intelligence analysts point out the cynical double game Saddam has been playing.
On the one hand, he complains about Iraqi infants dying from lack of food and medical supplies, allegedly because of the U.S.-supported sanctions.
But through the oil-for-food program and other means, Iraq has sold some $30 billion worth of oil since 1996.
Saddam allocated only $7 billion of the revenue for food and only $1 billion for medical supplies - leaving a huge amount to bribe and buy his way back to a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
The last known attempt to eliminate him was in the works in 1992 - when President Bush was finishing up his term and Barak was head of the Israeli armed forces.
A special Israeli unit planned to assassinate Saddam with a missile. But during training for the mission, it misfired and killed five commandos - and the plan was dropped.
It's not surprising then that Saddam is making his latest moves against Kuwait just as America is consumed by another presidential election. He survived George Bush, his arch-enemy, and he may just survive Bill Clinton as well.
---
Saddam warned not to repeat past actions
USA Today
09/17/00- Updated 01:43 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm
SINGAPORE - Claiming that the United States and Britain could defeat any threat, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen on Sunday warned Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to avoid taking ''any kind of aggressive action'' against his country's neighbors. Tension increased last week in the Middle East as Iraq accused Kuwait of drilling wells that allow it to siphon Iraqi oil and warned that it would move to halt its smaller neighbor's action. ''He should understand that the United States and our British friends are fully prepared to take whatever action is necessary to prevent him from trying to repeat his past actions,'' Cohen said. Friction between the United States and Iraq has been rising, mainly over renewed efforts to have U.N. inspectors search for hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
-------- russia
Russians Not Paying for Electricity
Associated Press
September 17, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Short-Circuit.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- As the electricity monopoly in the world's largest country, Russia's Unified Energy Systems has plenty of prodigious statistics -- including what could be the world's longest list of deadbeat customers.
Not only do they owe the partly state-owned UES an estimated $5 billion, but they include some of the country's most secret sites, including nuclear missile bases and the Plesetsk space launch facility.
The utility's attempts to collect its bills grabbed national attention last week when one of its local branches cut off power to a missile base that owed $683,000. The base retaliated by sending soldiers to a switching station to turn the lights back on.
In the wake of that dispute, the Plesetsk cosmodrome announced it had received a warning that switchoffs were imminent unless it paid $1.6 million in arrears. A missile base in Altai said it was being pressured to pay up on bills exceeding $180,000.
UES later ordered its subsidiaries not to cut power to strategic military units. But if that order quelled the uproar, it did not resolve the company's debt crisis.
The utility is caught in a web of financial problems that seem as complex as the 1.8 million miles of power lines it manages. It is both a victim of Russia's economic troubles and a contributor to them.
UES can't collect from many state-run installations, such as the military bases, because those operations are themselves underfunded. Even when it does collect, it's often in barter or in-kind services.
In the first half of this year, only 62 percent of the payments to UES were in cash, board member Andrei Trapeznikov said in a statement. Nonetheless, that's an improvement over past years, when cash collections were reported as low as 10 percent.
UES complains it has to sell electricity for unreasonably low rates, about 1 cent per kilowatt-hour. ``I am not proud of the epithet that UES is the world's largest and also the world's cheapest power company,'' chief executive Anatoly Chubais said in a letter to shareholders.
According to UES, power demand in Russia is rising at about 3 percent a year while the utility's troubles reduce its ability to increase supply, and it predicts demand will exceed capacity within about five years.
But charging more realistic rates could be catastrophic for Russia's economy, where many businesses survive by being able to sell their products at low prices made possible in part because of low power rates. Analysts say the energy-intensive aluminum industry, one of Russia's major exporters, could be especially vulnerable.
Industries that are effectively subsidized in this way are at the heart of what many Western economists have taken to calling Russia's ``virtual economy.''
According to one of the scholars who popularized the phrase, Barry Ickes of the University of Pennsylvania, rationalizing UES operations is the key to bringing Russia out of its economic bind.
``But you would need to have in place policies to cope with the political byproducts,'' such as wide unemployment that would be caused by raising rates, he said.
The Russian government, plagued by low tax collections, is unlikely to be able to marshal the money for that, he noted.
``At the end of the whole chain, the state hasn't been able to collect taxes,'' agreed William Browder of the Hermitage Fund, which has invested in UES.
The Russian state holds 52.5 percent of the utility's shares and foreigners own about 30 percent of the stock.
Chubais has proposed a complicated restructuring plan that he argues would bring more efficiency to the electricity market. Generating facilities would be spun off into some 70 regional operations while transmission and distribution facilities would remain national.
The plan has been widely criticized. Analysts say it would accomplish little and could be a new opportunity for unscrupulous entrepreneurs to grab pieces of an important enterprise at bargain prices. That happened at many other state-owned firms when Chubais was chief of the Russian government's privatization program.
``We see it as a thinly disguised attempt at asset-stripping,'' Browder said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Is Another Energy Crisis Ahead?
Washington Post
Sunday, September 17, 2000 ; H01
By Kenneth Bredemeier Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21134-2000Sep16.html
This winter the mailman will be delivering markedly higher heating bills throughout much of the country, including the Washington area.
Those who use natural gas--the dominant heating fuel in the Washington area and throughout the United States--face a 27 percent increase. Heating oil customers, particularly in the Northeast where 35 percent of homeowners use the fuel to warm their houses, may have to pay more than $2 a gallon--twice the current price--as the days grow shorter and temperatures plunge.
Motorists get hit in the wallet every time they pull into a service station: They now typically pay more than $1.60 a gallon for gas, and the days of 90-cent-a-gallon gas--yes, it was just last year--are but a distant memory. At least that's better than in England, France and Belgium where motorists are waiting in long lines to buy $4-a-gallon gas, only to find that some stations have run out.
Is this the start of an energy crisis?
Many energy analysts and government economists say not, that supplies of various forms of energy will prove sufficient over the next few months, but that the costs will continue to follow the law of supply and demand. When there's not an excess of a fuel available--and numerous types of fuel reserves are quite low--consumers will likely think the product costs too much, at least compared with the prices they've been accustomed to paying.
But as winter approaches, several loosely connected events that spanned the globe over the past couple of years have heightened awareness of energy in our lives and reminded us of a lesson learned in the 1970s: Energy prices can be volatile, unpredictable and can reverberate throughout the economy.
As Philip Verleger Jr., a partner with the Brattle Group, a Cambridge, Mass., economic consulting firm, concluded, "Consumers will have to spend more on energy. They will have less to spend on other things."
On top of the triple-whammy of higher natural gas, heating oil and gasoline prices, consumers are also vulnerable to the vagaries of the electricity market because the industry has been in the midst of deregulation.
While California and other states have struggled with power prices during the adjustment to the new competitive environment, electric utilities locally have maintained stability. Potomac Electric Power Co. says its 621,000 residential customers in the District and suburban Maryland--about 15 percent to 20 percent of whom heat their homes with electricity--will find their bills about 5.5 percent lower this winter, assuming they use the same amount of electricity as last year. Across the Potomac River, Dominion Virginia Power's customers in Northern Virginia are likely to see their bills stay about the same.
Much of the current energy pricing is out of consumers' hands, analysts say, because the United States has chosen, to a large degree, to remain dependent on oil pumped out of distant lands controlled by OPEC nations.
The 11-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed last weekend to increase its oil production by 800,000 barrels a day in hopes of pushing the price down to $28 or so. Even so, oil prices hit a new 10-year high on Friday, closing at $35.92 a barrel amid worries about tensions between Iraq and Kuwait. These are prices not seen since the days of the military buildup before the Persian Gulf War in November 1990.
Analysts say that 21 months ago, when oil was below $10 a barrel and natural gas was at $2 per 1,000 cubic feet, drilling companies, many of which produce both fuels, began to curtail their exploration as a result of dwindling revenue.
The OPEC nations cut their production at the time to force prices upward--and now they have more than tripled. Private exploration for more natural gas in the United States, chiefly in the Gulf of Mexico and several southern and southwestern states, only grew after drillers concluded that the demand was significant enough and they had sufficient capital to look for more.
Peggy Laramie, spokeswoman for the American Gas Association, the natural-gas utilities' trade group, said the low price of gas at the time contributed to a feeling by producers that there was plenty of supply, so they cut back on drilling for about nine months, from August 1998 to April 1999. Fewer than 400 rigs were drilling at the time, although now that figure has topped 800.
With little new natural gas exploration, the flow through the supply chain slowed, of course, even as demand increased in the United States, Europe and Asia.
The result was predictable: Higher natural-gas prices at the wellhead and, over time, bigger bills for consumers. The $2 wellhead price has now risen to $5. Laramie said the last time wellhead prices were this high was in 1985.
As Verleger said, "Demand was growing. We didn't pick up the supply and--whoops, there's a problem."
In the Washington area, where perhaps 70 percent of all homeowners heat with natural gas, Washington Gas Light Co. estimates that its residential customers will see the typical monthly bill jump $26, to $112.50, in the November-to-April period, a 27 percent increase over last winter.
Laramie said the gas utilities' trade group believes that with the renewed exploration, natural gas prices "will be moderating by spring, but we don't want to over-promise."
The price of oil and its derivative products is expected to remain volatile, depending on a host of factors, including demand by consuming nations, the severity of the upcoming winter months after a string of three relatively mild winters, and how much more oil OPEC nations might decide to produce if prices stay high.
This mix of factors leaves the analysts, OPEC and government economists using a lot of "ifs" and "buts" and "possibilities," but mentioning few certainties.
OPEC President Ali Rodriguez predicted this past week that oil prices could reach $40 a barrel this winter, even if only for a relatively short time.
"Crude oil prices are very high and will remain very high throughout the rest of the year," said John Lichtblau, chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, which is funded by oil companies. In terms of gasoline, a shortage is unlikely, "but prices will be high," he said. "It can go back to $1.40 a gallon because of more production and lower crude prices. It won't start right now, maybe later this year or early next year."
But with heating oil, he said, an unusually cold winter in the Northeast could bring about problems, given low inventories. "I don't see a shortage, but prices will be very high."
Verleger was less certain.
"We do have a problem," he said. "I think we're going to see high prices this winter for heating oil and natural gas. But I'm not certain about it. I'm not willing to go out and say it's going to be awful."
With oil prices at record levels, President Clinton last week came under increasing pressure to tap the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, nearly 570 million barrels of crude oil stashed at four sites in Louisiana and Texas.
The reserve is intended for use in cases where the president determines there is a national supply emergency. High prices alone do not qualify. The White House says all options to combat the current low reserves of various fuels and high prices are under consideration. In the past, however, the oil reserve has been tapped to combat mechanical breakdowns in the oil industry's pipeline system or to trade lower-quality oil for a better grade.
"If the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is released, that would knock $15 a barrel off the price," Verleger said. "One piece of news like that and this [crude oil price] will drop like a rock."
At least for the winter months, electric utilities generally have found a way around the high price of oil and natural gas that some of them must use during peak-demand periods in the summer to generate electricity. They're able to focus their winter generation on cheaper fuels--coal, nuclear and hydroelectric power.
"That's cheaper fuel and fuel that's less subject to the volatility of the world oil and world natural-gas markets," said Chuck Linderman, director of energy generation and supply policy for the Edison trade group. "Generally we're in good shape on supply."
-------- new mexico
Guilty Plea, Release Leave Unresolved Questions in Lee Case
Washington Poat
Sunday, September 17, 2000 ; A12
By Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=wpni/print&articleid=A12846-2000Sep15
After nine months in jail, the Taiwanese American nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee went free last week after pleading guilty to removing classified information from Los Alamos National Laboratory. But many of the key questions about his case remain unanswered.
Under the terms of his plea agreement, Lee is required to submit to detailed questioning by the FBI. But the government may keep his answers secret, on the grounds of his privacy and the nation's security.
Among the central issues that remain in dispute are whether China stole U.S. nuclear secrets, why the government investigation focused on Lee, why he copied data about nuclear weapons onto portable tapes, and how important the data may be.
While definitive answers may not yet be possible, recent court hearings and interviews with Lee's colleagues have provided some new information. It now appears, for example, that Lee's motive in making the tapes may have been to ensure that he could continue to do unclassified work in his specialty, hydrodynamics, at other laboratories if he lost his job at Los Alamos.
Lee's case began in 1996 as an investigation, code-named Kindred Spirit, into China's alleged theft of U.S. nuclear secrets. But the FBI never found evidence that he had passed secrets to any foreign country, and he was never charged with spying.
After the espionage investigation stalled, Lee was fired last year from Los Alamos, where he had worked for nearly 20 years. The FBI then searched his office and found that he had transferred or "downloaded" data from the lab's classified computer system to his unsecure desktop computer and 10 tapes, seven of which were missing.
This triggered a second investigation and, eventually, Lee's prosecution on 59 counts of mishandling classified information, an indictment that fell short of espionage but still carried a possible life sentence.
Moreover, prosecutors argued successfully that Lee should not be released on bail. While awaiting trial, he was initially held in solitary confinement, with a light bulb burning 24 hours a day and shackles on his legs during a single hour of daily exercise.
Meanwhile, his defense lawyers chipped away at the prosecution's arguments. Last month, they forced an FBI agent to admit that, contrary to his prior testimony, Lee had not lied to a colleague about the downloading. They also found experts who questioned the secrecy of the information.
With their case in trouble, prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain. Last Wednesday, Lee admitted his guilt on a single felony count. U.S. District Judge James A. Parker sentenced Lee to the time he had served, apologizing profusely for the "demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions" of Lee's confinement. The judge said he had been "led astray" by the executive branch of government.
Did China Steal U.S. Nuclear Secrets?
Suspicions of espionage began with nine underground nuclear tests conducted by China and monitored by U.S. satellites and seismic stations from 1990 to 1995. They indicated that China had, in a short time, developed both a neutron bomb and a very compact weapon similar to America's W-88, the warhead on the latest U.S. sub-launched intercontinental missile, the Trident II.
U.S. intelligence analysts wondered whether Beijing's scientists could have made such rapid progress on their own. Notra Trulock III, then head of the Energy Department's intelligence unit, became even more alarmed when he saw a Chinese military document that had been provided in 1995 by a purported defector who walked into the U.S. Embassy in Taiwan.
The "walk-in document," dated 1988, contained a chart on seven U.S. warheads, including the weight, range, yield, dimensions and a line drawing of each.
In 1995, Trulock convened a group of five scientists to review the evidence of espionage. Some members dissented, but Trulock began an administrative inquiry into who was responsible, and he quickly focused on Los Alamos, where the W-88 was designed. In 1996, he started briefing senior officials, telling them that Chinese espionage had resulted in the loss of important design data on several U.S. nuclear weapons, particularly the W-88.
Trulock has maintained in congressional testimony that his findings were upheld by an intelligence community assessment delivered in April 1999 by CIA analyst Robert Walpole. But the Walpole panel's findings were not so cut and dried. The assessment said that spying had "probably accelerated" China's nuclear program but that the Chinese were "more likely" to have used stolen data "to inform their own program than to replicate U.S. weapons designs."
Moreover, the panel said China gained information not just from espionage, but also from "contact with U.S. and other countries' scientists, conferences and publications, unauthorized media disclosures, declassified U.S. weapons information, and Chinese indigenous development." The "relative contribution of each" of these sources, it concluded, "cannot be determined."
Both of Trulock's conclusions--that China stole weapons designs and that the information probably came from Los Alamos--have been challenged by scientists and intelligence experts.
Paul Robinson, director of Sandia National Laboratories and former head of nuclear weapons development at Los Alamos, said the data in the walk-in document were basic "geometrical information that is shared with U.S. explosive ordnance people around the world," meaning that "hundreds of agencies of the U.S. government had documents with the same information."
Former senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which reviewed the espionage allegations last year, said in an interview last week, "It is my belief that there was no espionage" involved with the W-88 data obtained by the Chinese. As far as China's new, smaller warhead, Rudman said, "What they did, they did on their own."
Why Did Government Focus on Wen Ho Lee?
The Energy Department's internal probe, prompted by the "walk-in document," began in 1995. Trulock started with all Los Alamos personnel who had knowledge of the W-88 data, then determined which of them had traveled to China in the 1980s. The resulting list contained 12 names, including at least one other Chinese American. Lee's name, however, was at the top.
Trulock insists that his report, sent to the FBI in early 1996, did not single out Lee. But in May 1999, when Congress was in an uproar over the espionage allegations, Trulock testified that by spring 1996, "we had completed our administrative inquiry and had identified a potential suspect."
Lee was at the top of the list because he had traveled to China in 1986 and 1988, and because he and his wife, Sylvia, had taken an active role in greeting visiting Chinese scientists. She had also accompanied Lee on his 1986 trip. What Trulock did not know is that Sylvia Lee had been helping the FBI with information about the Chinese.
After Trulock submitted his report, the FBI picked up the case and continued to focus on Lee. A year earlier, a confidential informant had reported that Lee appeared friendly with a senior Chinese weapons designer who was visiting Los Alamos. Since Lee had never reported any contacts with the visitor, as Los Alamos security rules required, the bureau was suspicious.
In November 1998, Trulock appeared at two closed sessions of a select committee, chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), that was looking into Chinese espionage. In January 1999, four months before public release of the Cox committee's report, word began to leak out to journalists that a Los Alamos scientist with an Asian surname was under investigation. On March 6, 1999, the New York Times published a front-page story that said in part: "Government investigators had identified a suspect, an American scientist at Los Alamos. . . . This suspect 'stuck out like a sore thumb,' said one official."
Two days later, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson directed the University of California, which administers Los Alamos, to fire Lee. Richardson said in a recent interview that Lee was discharged because he had not been honest with lab officials, had failed to report fully on his meetings with Chinese scientists, and had misplaced information. In addition, Richardson said, "there was pressure to make an example of him."
Why Did He Make The Computer Tapes?
As they celebrated his return home last week, some of Lee's supporters remained convinced that his downloads were dumb but not sinister, most likely performed to back up his work against computer crashes.
Robert Vrooman, Los Alamos National Laboratory's former counterintelligence director, does not buy that theory, and neither do many other nuclear weapons scientists at the lab.
Vrooman does not believe Lee is a spy. But "he was up to something--I'm puzzled, and I want to know what," said Vrooman, a former CIA operations officer.
Working secretively, often late at night and on weekends, Lee downloaded 1.4 gigabytes of data, a little more than half of which--800 megabytes--was classified. That's the equivalent of 430,000 pages, a stack of paper 134 feet high.
Most officials at the lab now accept the proposition that Lee's downloads were at least partly related to a notice he received in 1993 that he might be laid off, since that is when his intensive downloading began.
A number of lab officials and scientists now also believe Lee wanted the computer programs or "codes," not to give them to a foreign power, but to continue using them in his field of expertise, hydrodynamics, the study of how solid materials behave as they turn to fluids under extreme pressure.
"The prosecutors have said that he wanted to create his own personal library of nuclear weapons codes," said one former X Division scientist who worked directly with Lee. "But these codes have lots of other uses."
Lee is an expert in armor-piercing projectiles, a subject about which he published many unclassified papers as a Los Alamos scientist, his former colleague said. Without portions of the programs he downloaded, the former colleague added, he would not have been able to do the calculations needed to continue writing such scholarly papers, and would not have been able to reproduce the algorithms on his own.
"Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of hydrodynamics is unclassified," added Chris Mechels, another former Los Alamos scientist who knew Lee in the lab's top-secret X Division. "It's only classified when you put it in a weapons code. So a reasonable hypothesis would be, he was making a copy of his unclassified work in a classified product."
He should have known better, Mechels said, but that's a far cry from spying for China.
How Important Was Information on Tapes?
One Los Alamos weapons scientist, Stephen Younger, testified in court that the tapes represented "a complete portable nuclear design capability," information so sensitive, he said, that it could "change the global strategic balance." Another scientist, John Richter, scoffed at Younger's claims, saying 99 percent of what's on the tapes is unclassified science.
But scientists inside and outside the nation's nuclear weapons complex say the information Lee downloaded is enormously sensitive and should be safeguarded at the highest possible security level.
One senior lab official said the computer programs are valuable, not because of the basic science embedded in them, but because they have been refined and linked to simulate an entire thermonuclear weapon, from primary to secondary detonation.
Just because a dictionary is unclassified, the official said, doesn't mean everything written in the English language is unclassified too. "It's how you put the poem together, how you put the novel together," the official said, adding that there are only about 25 people left in America who can seamlessly link the codes to re-create a full fusion reaction.
On the seven missing tapes, Lee downloaded four complete weapons codes, A, B, D and I. Code B, which simulates the primary stage of a nuclear weapon, and Code A, which simulates the secondary stage, were among the most modern codes at the time Lee downloaded them, used on an almost daily basis to evaluate the reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile.
In addition to those computer programs, Lee also downloaded complete data sets, known as input decks, necessary to run the programs. While the codes describe the physical processes that take place inside a weapon, an input deck describes the geometry of a specific warhead or bomb.
Written in Fortran, each code is hundreds of thousands of lines long. While the codes would be unintelligible to a layman, a graduate student in physics trained in Fortran could print out the material and read it like a textbook.
As a general rule, scientists say, the codes Lee downloaded would be of little value to a nonnuclear state, of moderate value to a fledgling nuclear nation, such as Pakistan, and of extreme value to an advanced nuclear nation such as China, where scientists could use the codes to better understand the yield-to-weight ratio of U.S. weapons, as well as their designcharacteristics and their vulnerabilities.
One Los Alamos official said the codes Lee downloaded offer the fullest description in the world of how materials behave in energy domains ranging from a firecracker to a star.
To any other nuclear nation, the official said, "that would be of great value."
--------
. . . Secrecy on Trial
Washington Post
Sunday, September 17, 2000 ; B07
By Kenneth C. Bass III
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17716-2000Sep16.html
The president was justified in being troubled over the Kafkaesque course of the Wen Ho Lee trial. The bizarre twists are enough to trouble anyone concerned about the administration of justice and protection of the national security. But beneath those symptoms of a system out of control lies a far broader issue.
The Justice Department's decision to accept a guilty plea to only one of 59 felony charges with no incarceration beyond time served stands in stark contrast to the alleged dangers to the nation that persuaded Judge James A. Parker to keep Lee in solitary confinement last December. The 1999 testimony by an FBI agent that Lee lied to a fellow employee about downloading computer files stands contradicted by that same agent's sworn admission last month that he had made an honest mistake in his prior testimony. The FBI director's statement this week that "some of the information . . . was not classified" undercuts prior testimony that Lee had jeopardized the "crown jewels" of the United States nuclear weapons program.
Criminal prosecution for mishandling classified information is rare, despite the fact that security rules are often violated. A former head of counterintelligence at the Energy Department said cases like Lee's were routinely handled by counseling the employee. Congress is justified in wanting to examine the decision to deploy all the artillery of the criminal process in this case.
At the same time, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is right to remind us that prior congressional pressure may well have precipitated the indictment. The circus of Hill hearings is probably not the best forum for examining the process. It would be far better for the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to prepare a public report.
Beyond the confines of this case, the Lee fiasco illustrates a deep-seated problem with our ability to administer justice in the face of incantations of "national security." Any counsel who has ever been involved in national security litigation recognizes that every legal rule changes in that context. Statutes that are otherwise unambiguous are stretched and distorted. Discretionary judgments become clouded. The specter of grave national injury hangs over the proceeding and distorts the process.
The dilemma is heightened by the presence of classified information, especially nuclear "secrets." Not only is the judiciary, as a general rule, inexperienced in dealing with national security issues, the government lawyers in the field who direct investigations, make prosecution decisions and conduct the trials have often never been exposed to classified materials. Government employees who spend their entire work life in a classified environment learn to distinguish "true threats" from rampant overclassification, but the neophyte cannot be expected to evaluate claims of grave injury.
It comes as no surprise to career intelligence personnel to read that while government witnesses claimed Lee endangered "crown jewels," a veteran Los Alamos weapons designer testified that the information "would not harm national security, even if it fell into the hands of a foreign power." That same official testified that "99 percent of the information was available in open scientific literature." An inexperienced individual asked to decide whose opinion was correct faces a hopeless task.
Those who have spent years in classified environments would immediately question the government's claims. If these data were indeed the crown jewels why were they classified at only the "Secret" level? By definition, information that could, if compromised, lead to grave national harm must be classified "Top Secret," and federal agencies are not known for underclassifying.
A judge who hears that these are "restricted data" available only to individuals with "Q clearances" will naturally reach the often false conclusion that this stuff must be important. Career officials know that those labels are automatically applied to information related to nuclear weapons and do not indicate extraordinary sensitivity.
More than 20 years ago, in another "nuclear secrets" litigation arising at Los Alamos, the Justice Department went to a federal judge claiming that vital nuclear weapons technology was at risk. In that case Justice sought--and obtained--an injunction against publication of an article on "How to Make an H-bomb." Despite the First Amendment and despite the Pentagon Papers decision, the court accepted the government's claims and suppressed the article.
But those claims of danger proved shallow when the Justice Department later learned that the same information had been placed on the public shelves of the Los Alamos Library, a fact not reported in the judicial decisions and thus not easily discovered by counsel or judges who want to know why the government consented to vacate the injunction.
Lee stands convicted of compromising nuclear secrets. But his plea does not clear up the cloud of concern that still hangs over this case. Nor should his bargained-for admission cause any of us to lose sight of the high risk to the rule of law that arises whenever the talismanic phrase "national security" is uttered. Yes, there are still actual threats to national security, and our law enforcement and counterintelligence communities must remain vigilant. But national security claims, like any others, need to be subject to the same rigorous standards of cross-examination and proof applied to ordinary issues.
The writer served in the Carter administration as the Justice Department's first counsel for intelligence policy.
---
In the Wake of Wen Ho Lee . . .
Washington Post
Sunday, September 17, 2000 ; B07
By Jeffrey H. Smith
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17740-2000Sep16.html
What is the nation to make of last week's events in the Wen Ho Lee case? As with Chou En-lai's observation about the significance of the French Revolution, "It's too early to tell." That's because espionage cases often involve our most important secrets, and the true story may never be known.
Espionage cases are probably the most difficult criminal cases to bring because in almost every one the government has additional information it does not wish to use in court. We do not know if that is the case here, but information has surfaced only recently that sheds new light on many of the most important espionage cases of the past.
For example, we now know that the government intercepted and decrypted KGB messages that proved the guilt of Julius Rosenberg, executed with his wife, Ethel, in 1953 for giving atomic secrets to the Soviets. But the United States did not use the intercepts in court in order to protect our phenomenal cryptanalytic success. Tragically, the intercepts also strongly suggested that Ethel was not guilty of crimes justifying her execution.
But some things are clear now: Lee's conduct is reprehensible. The government is right to insist that he explain why he downloaded nearly 400,000 pages of information relating to nuclear weapons, much of which is classified. In this regard, the attorney general was correct when she said that the plea agreement "is in the best interest of our national security, in that it gives us our best chance to find out what happened to the [missing] tapes." She concluded that protecting national security outweighs the interests of obtaining a conviction.
Yet her statement seemed like making a silk purse out of a sow's ear--an impression bolstered by the president's extraordinary observations in the Rose Garden that he had been deeply troubled by the case and by Lee's detention.
This case is far from over. Even if Lee tells the truth about the missing seven tapes, it is clear that the case will have a number of long-term consequences:
First, another National Lab scientist, Peter Lee, was convicted in 1997 of passing nuclear secrets to the Chinese. If Wen Ho Lee is not a Chinese spy, is a "third man" still spying for China? Or have the Chinese penetrated our computer or communications systems?
Second, a poisonous atmosphere among the government, contractors, security professionals and scientists reportedly permeates the labs. That must be fixed--and fast. Real security comes not from guards and fences, but from a genuine commitment by all employees to make security an integral part of the job.
Third, this case will make future espionage prosecutions much more difficult. In the past, courts have understandably given great deference to government officials. Affidavits by Cabinet-level officials attesting to the classified nature of the information are almost never challenged. Testimony by FBI agents, usually impossible to refute, is given credence. This case seriously challenges both of those propositions. In the future, judges will be much less inclined to believe assertions by federal officials in espionage cases.
Fourth, Congress and the Washington political class must understand that, when they fire up emotions about a foreign devil, they risk pressuring the law enforcement and intelligence authorities to move more rapidly than good trade craft and the Constitution allow. The Wen Ho Lee case occurred amid allegations of Chinese espionage and concerns about China's growing strategic position. Allegations about Chinese participation in the 1996 presidential campaign further fueled the fire. It is difficult for the Justice Department to segregate investigative and prosecutorial decisions from any political fury swirling in Washington.
Fifth, politicians and pundits must act responsibly as they criticize the Justice Department's handling of this case. Just as political pressure likely fueled, in some respect, the government's handling of the case, political excoriation of the Justice Department may make the government gun-shy in future espionage investigations.
Sixth, this case demonstrates once again the need for good working relationships between the law enforcement and intelligence communities.
Seventh, the best defense is a good offense--namely, a vigorous and successful penetration of a hostile government's intelligence service by the CIA. That's another reason why CIA Director George Tenet's emphasis on building a strong human intelligence capacity is absolutely vital.
This case presents perplexing problems. As we consider them, we must proceed thoughtfully; the national security and the Constitution demand it. But if we're having trouble understanding it, what in the world are they thinking in Beijing?
The writer is a Washington lawyer and former general counsel of the CIA.
---
The Prosecution of Wen Ho Lee
Washington Post
Sunday, September 17, 2000 ; B06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17729-2000Sep16.html
So let me get this straight: The FBI interrogates a 60-year-old man, threatening him with, among other things, the suggestion that he could be electrocuted [news story, Jan. 8]. He's then dragged off to prison, where he is held in solitary confinement for nine months without bail.
And now the FBI is proud to say that it achieved its goal of securing the full cooperation of Mr. Lee [front page, Sept. 11]. This after he agreed to plead guilty to one charge out of 59, including 39 that carry life sentences.
Cooperation? All that was left was to drag out the whips and chains. This was a bungled investigation, influenced by a politically partisan administration.
IAN L. SITREN Santa Ana, Calif.
In all the commotion about security in our nuclear labs, there is a strange confusion about what the government has called the "crown jewels" of our nuclear weapons program--i.e., the allegedly stolen atomic secrets. The real crown jewels of our nuclear establishment are the scientists and engineers who maintain the health of our nuclear deterrence. And they have been demoralized by the attacks on their trustworthiness.
Atomic scientist Edward Teller, who knows something about secrecy and national security, has put it in a nutshell: "The criticism comes to a great extent from people who have quite a limited understanding of what really goes on in the labs in a scientific way. They're not only ignorant, they are not aware of the fact that they're ignorant."
MAURICE M. SHAPIRO Alexandria
The writer was a group leader in the wartime Los Alamos Laboratory.
-------- us nuc politics
Bush, Gore differ on global role
Democrat favors activism;
Republican is restrained
Columbus Dispatch
Sunday, September 17, 2000
Jonathan Riskind Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief
http://www.dispatch.com/news/newsfea00/sep00/424142.html
WASHINGTON -- On several significant foreign-policy fronts, Al Gore and George W. Bush have world views as far apart as the gulf between Israelis and Palestinians embroiled in the never-ending Middle East peace talks.
If Democratic presidential nominee Gore ascends from vice president to commander in chief on Nov. 7, the AIDS epidemic in Africa and global warming will be high on the list of foreign-policy priorities.
To Gore, foreign policy is all about "forward engagement" into all parts of the globe, from regional conflicts in the Balkans and Ireland to genocide in Africa and "disruption of the world's ecological systems."
As defined by Gore in an April 30 speech in Boston, forward engagement is a strategy to employ American resources, including troops if needed, to address "problems early in their development before they become crises. . . . To meet these challenges requires cooperation on a scale not seen before. It demands that we confront threats before they spiral out of control."
If GOP nominee Bush vaults to the White House from the Texas governor's mansion, it will be a cold day in Haiti when U.S. troops are sent on humanitarian missions to countries not considered vital to America's national-security interests.
To Bush, foreign policy is about focusing on "enduring national interests," such as American ties with Europe and stable relations with Russia and China. Bush favored America's initial intervention in the Balkans but isn't enthusiastic about a sustained commitment there, and he wouldn't have sent troops into such places as Haiti, as did the Clinton-Gore administration.
"America must be involved in the world," Bush said last November in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. "But that does not mean our military is the answer to every difficult foreign-policy situation -- a substitute for strategy. American internationalism should not mean action without vision, activity without priority and missions without end -- an approach that squanders American will and drains American energy."
In essence, Gore attempts to paint himself as possessing the vision to lead a globally interdependent world needing help from the last superpower. Bush tries to portray himself as a hard-eyed realist willing to pursue a national missile-defense system with or without the consent of other countries and unwilling to play international cop.
But some foreign-policy experts don't see much evidence that a Gore or Bush administration would operate so differently abroad. They note that both candidates are internationalists at their core who stress the necessity of free trade with nearly all nations.
And it isn't clear just what Gore would do to take on such problems as AIDS and global warming that isn't already being done through foreign aid and other initiatives, said James Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
For his part, Bush isn't going to pull U.S. troops out of the Korean Peninsula, Germany or the Mediterranean, Lindsay said. And removing U.S. forces from the Balkans or pursuing a unilateral missile-defense system would anger the European allies at the center of Bush's foreign-policy strategy, he noted.
"I don't think in the foreign-policy debate today we are really seeing fundamental differences," Lindsay said. "It's like two four-wheel-drive cars being packaged differently. There are some differences, but at the end of the day they are really just four-wheel-drive cars with combustion engines."
Senior advisers to Gore and Bush beg to differ.
"I think you will see a Bush administration considerably more focused around issues of national interest," said Condoleezza Rice, a principal foreign-policy adviser to Bush and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "There are some really significant differences."
Global warming and the AIDS epidemic are important. But those types of problems cannot be at the forefront of what shapes the U.S. foreign-policy agenda, Rice said. Bush would devote more effort than Gore to improving U.S. military readiness, working on trade relations, stabilizing conditions in Latin America and working on the "big relationships" with Russia and China, she said.
Foreign objections, whether from Russia or European allies, to an American missile-defense initiative stem largely from Clinton administration ineptitude, Rice charged. Key allies weren't consulted ahead of time and included in the system's planned protections. And Russian objections that such a system violates the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty could be overridden if the Russians could be convinced that an "entirely new strategic concept" aimed at preventing limited nuclear strikes could help them as much as the United States, she said.
"We have to convince the Russians that it is time to move beyond a doctrine that came from a time when the worry was a major Soviet bolt out of the blue in Europe," Rice said. "That world is gone."
But a senior foreign-policy adviser to Gore charged that a Bush administration would have an "unrealistically narrow" view.
Gore agrees that dealing with "classical engagement issues of war and peace" and the need for a "solid defense" are at the heart of any administration's foreign policy, said Bruce Jentleson, senior coordinator of foreign issues for the vice president's campaign and director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University.
"But we also need to deal with new agenda issues . . . ethnic conflicts, the global environment," Jentleson said. "Our national interests are such that when ethnic cleansing is happening in the world we can't just look the other way."
Gore favors pursuing a missile-defense system, but that pursuit must examine whether the technology and cost justify endangering arms-control efforts and hampering relations with allies and foes alike, Jentleson said.
"The tendency on the Republican side is to make this a test of testosterone rather than technology," he said. "We need to be more sober and pragmatic than that."
Of course, neither Gore nor Bush actually spends much time on the campaign trail debating foreign policy.
It was barely mentioned in either man's nomination acceptance speech last month. Both have laid out basic principles in a few national-security and foreign-policy addresses over the past months, but not nearly in the same detail they have lavished on their health care and education proposals.
Why not? Polls show that since the Cold War, foreign policy and national security have been way down the list of issues that voters care about, said Randall Ripley, dean of the Ohio State University College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and a political science professor.
The election won't hinge on such issues as which missile-defense plan voters like more or whose policies on military expeditions find more favor, he said.
"The bottom line as I see it is neither candidate is talking very much about foreign policy and the public doesn't care, or at least cares reasonably little," Ripley said. Barring a major international crisis between now and Election Day, foreign policy will remain a "nonissue."
But Bush, Gore and their cadres of foreign-policy advisers would be loath to admit that international concerns are far down the list of campaign priorities. After all, either man could be making life-and-death decisions by next year.
And even if the rhetoric remains short on detail, it isn't hard to spot a distinct difference in outlook.
"I believe that now we have a profound responsibility to open the gates of opportunity for all the world's people so that they can become stakeholders in the kind of society we would like to build at large in the world and at home," Gore said on April 30 in Boston.
"Let me be clear: Promoting prosperity throughout the world is a crucial form of forward engagement."
"As president, I will order an immediate review of our overseas deployments -- in dozens of countries," Bush said last year in a speech at The Citadel military college in South Carolina.
"I will work hard to find political solutions that allow an orderly and timely withdrawal from places like Kosovo and Bosnia. We will encourage our allies to take a broader role. We will not be hasty. But we will not be permanent peacekeepers, dividing warring parties."
-------------
The Museum of the American Century
Washington Post
Sunday, September 17, 2000
By Bob Thompson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5693-2000Sep14.html
It hangs in the air above you, this impossibly fragile spruce and ash and wire and muslin contraption, like some rare butterfly facing immediate extinction, like a Soap Box Derby entry dwarfed by NASCAR behemoths, like a child's handmade box kite in the path of an ICBM.
Crane your neck a little higher and you can almost hear Charles Lindbergh revving the engine on the Spirit of St. Louis. Across the way, in the fire-tinted Glamorous Glennis-kaboom!-Chuck Yeager slams through the sound barrier one more time. And now, oh my God, better cover your ears: the Saturn V is shaking the foundations of the National Air and Space Museum as it gathers itself to rocket those three men in that battered metal canister over there-quick: can you name them?-toward their rendezvous with human destiny and the moon.
But hold the hallucinations and the pop quiz. Right now, we're supposed to be thinking about Where It All Began.
"One thing which I should probably point out," says aeronautics curator Peter Jakab as his lecture audience crowds around the Wright Flyer in the museum's Milestones of Flight gallery, "is that that is the actual first airplane to fly." Not a model, not a reproduction, but a shard of history itself. "The fabric covering that's on it looks rather new because it is fairly new. It was re-covered in 1985. But other than the fabric, what you see hanging there is what made the very first flights carrying the Wright brothers in 1903."
Jakab, an articulate and thoughtful historian with an attention-grabbing tie and a low-tech microphone with which he's not quite comfortable, goes on to sketch a portrait of the two odd ducks from Dayton, Ohio, who came up with this "stunning piece of mechanical and aeronautical engineering." If you had lived next door to Wilbur and Orville Wright in the 1880s, he says, when the brothers were coming of age, "you probably would have felt sorry for their parents. These were two guys who were kind of going nowhere fast."
You would have been wrong, of course.
In 1892, Will and Orv started a small bicycle rental and repair shop; before long they were turning out their own bikes as well. "All handcrafted originals," Jakab says. "One of the ironic things about the Wright brothers, who gave us one of the defining technologies of the 20th century, the airplane, is that they were very much 19th-century artisans in their approach to technology and design."
A few years later, they started messing around with flying machines. Their experience with two-wheelers served them well, as did their conceptual approach to problem-solving. They realized that, like a bicycle, an airplane could be "entirely unstable and entirely controllable" at the same time. Understanding this, they could focus less on built-in stability and more on sophisticated controls.
Like all great inventors, the Wrights weren't afraid to trust their own judgment. When they suspected that the lift calculations done by other aviation pioneers were wrong, for instance, they decided to collect their own data, which led them to develop what became the modern wind tunnel. Thus they not only invented the airplane, Jakab explains, but in many respects "they invented the practice of aeronautical engineering."
They did all this between 1899, when Wilbur wrote a letter to the Smithsonian requesting information on flying machines, and 1903, when their 605-pound creation lifted off from the windswept sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In those four years-as they conducted their research, traveled back and forth from Dayton to Kitty Hawk, bought components and contracted to have a few things made that they couldn't make on their own-"they spent only one thousand dollars."
So they made it on the cheap, this machine that changed our lives forever, and largely by themselves. Two guys on the shoreline of a new century, tinkering with space and time.
As Jakab talks, I can't help thinking of something one of his Air and Space colleagues, Tom Crouch, told me the other day. As the beginning of this new century approached, Crouch said, the good folks over at the Newseum in Arlington decided to release a list of what they claimed were the top 100 news stories of the past 100 years. The first four entries were:
"(1) United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki: Japan surrenders to end World War II. 1945.
"(2) American astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to walk on the moon. 1969.
"(3) Japan bombs Pearl Harbor: United States enters World War II. 1941.
"(4) Wilbur and Orville Wright fly the first powered airplane. 1903."
Crouch promptly registered a complaint. You've got the order wrong as usual, he told the Newseum's director when they next ran into each other. Because the first three things on that list would never have even happened if it weren't for number four.
The Legend of the Lone Eagle
Crouch was just having fun, of course, but he's got a point. If you're looking to understand how the world got to be the way it is in the 21st century, the Wrights' flight is huge. And as a place to contemplate such cosmic questions, the National Air and Space Museum-this gargantuan temple to progress, technology, air power and human aspiration-is hard to beat.
Much of what we take for granted in the year 2000 can be seen in embryo here, from the globalization of the economy to the redefinition of war to the computerization of practically everything. (Memo to Bill Gates: If you want better press for your version of technological empire building, you might want to endow a National Museum of Cyberspace. Soon.)
Think the Cold War changed the world some? It's all over the building, mostly dressed up as the Space Race. Think big government-or "technocracy," as historian Walter McDougall likes to call it-is problematic? You've come to the right place to trace its roots.
There are limits to what you can see from an Air and Space perspective. History is too multifaceted to be viewed through a single frame. You won't find much here on medicine, for example, though medical advances have had perhaps the greatest impact on our day-to-day lives-simply by extending them-of any scientific work done this century. You can find a few traces of the civil rights revolution and of the radical change in the role of women, but you have to dig for them.
More problematic than these omissions is the distorting effect of Air and Space's celebratory mission, which clashes repeatedly with complex examinations of the past. The heavily politicized struggle over the 1995 Enola Gay exhibition is only the most notorious example. Want to know about the number one news story of the century? The B-29 itself is off display now, but you can find a short segment about it on the museum's $5 audio tour. The tape will tell you in considerable detail why the aircraft bears the deliberately misleading insignia of the 313th Bomber Group on its restored rear stabilizer. It offers not one syllable about why we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or how the world changed as a result.
But let's skip over this little difficulty for now. It serves as a useful reminder that even the richest museums can't do all your work for you. The way you experience a historical artifact-and the National Air and Space Museum is jammed to the rafters with jaw-dropping historical artifacts-depends less on what the museum's label tells you than it does on the information, understanding and viewpoint you carry with you when you walk through the door.
So why not grab your historical perspective, whatever it happens to be, and join me for an Air and Space Tour of the American Century. We'll consider the life-altering implications of such things as the DC-3, the B-17 bomber, Wernher von Braun's slide rule, a barely visible smudge in the constellation Andromeda and the digitalized guidance system of the Minuteman missile. I'll call on expert help from the museum's curators along the way, though any mistakes I make will be mine, not theirs.
And please-feel free to argue back at any time.
We'll begin by peeling off from Peter Jakab's group and moving just a few yards farther into the museum, to our second stop. This would be the Spirit of St. Louis, the customized single-engined Ryan monoplane in which 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh flew 3,610 miles from New York to Paris in 331/2 hours in May 1927, kicking off a euphoric orgy of national pride and aviation worship that turned him into what biographer Scott Berg calls "the first modern media superstar."
If Orville and Wilbur Wright were 19th-century artisans at heart, Lindbergh, too, had his share of the old-time virtues Americans prized. He "appeared polite, modest, honest, and without moral faults," as historian Joseph Corn put it inThe Winged Gospel. Much was made of the Minnesota-bred pilot's descent from "pioneer stock"; he was compared to "Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and other individualists who, with knife and axe, wit and muscle, tamed a virgin land and built a civilization." His feat seemed to bridge the growing cultural gap between this kind of freelance heroics and the more impersonal triumphs of modern technology. The most important component of Lindbergh's image, as Corn and others have pointed out, was the fact that he conquered the Atlantic alone.
Which he did, of course, exhibiting remarkable skill and courage. Yet the true story of flight as it developed over the century-indeed, the story of all technology as it became progressively more expensive and sophisticated-has been one of increasingly collaborative effort, not of solo heroics. More and more, it came to involve the federal government, especially the armed forces. The legend of the "Lone Eagle" obscures a number of facts that foreshadowed this change.
Lindbergh's first solo flight took place in a $500 Army surplus biplane that he bought in 1923. He joined the Army Air Service so he could go to flight school. He honed his skills delivering the U.S. mail between St. Louis and Chicago. His New York to Paris flight was funded by a group of air-minded St. Louis businessmen, and his plane was manufactured by a small California company that would grow into a major aerospace contractor. On the museum's second floor is a monument to this collaboration: a small display case containing the Spirit's original spinner cap, complete with the signatures of the men from Ryan Aeronautical who built the plane.
Perhaps the most important decision Charles Lindbergh made was to trust his life to a plane with a single engine. He chose the Wright J-5 Whirlwind, a newly developed, exceptionally reliable air-cooled design that the Wright Company had recently decided to produce-after its arm was twisted by one of its biggest customers, the U.S. Navy.
The Bureaucrat Who Invented the Airline
Our next stop is Gallery 102, the Hall of Air Transportation. Don't be tempted by the gift shop as we walk by; you can get your National Air and Space Museum tank tops and your freeze-dried ice cream sandwiches and your "Star Wars" mouse pads on your way out. Ignore the ancient DC-7 on the ground over there, the one the crowd is lining up to walk through. No, you'll want to keep your eyes on that big aluminum underbelly overhead: the stogie-shaped tube with the straight wings and the twin propellers and "Fly Eastern Air Lines" lettered on the side.
It's a Douglas DC-3, circa 1937, otherwise known as the World's First Commercially Viable Airplane.
Brought to you by (drumroll, please) a visionary postmaster general of the United States.
"Ninety-nine percent of the population has no clue where the airline industry came from," says Bob van der Linden, the Air and Space curator responsible for commercial aviation. The prevailing myth, van der Linden explains, is that it was built by a clutch of trail-blazing entrepreneurs, "and there's some truth to that, but there's also a lot of fiction. Entrepreneurs don't go out there and raise money to build an industry unless there's money to be made. And there was no money to be made in commercial aviation until the federal government set up conditions that were conducive to it."
This was done mainly by the Post Office, which was looking for a faster way to move the mail. It created the U.S. Air Mail Service in 1918, using first Army pilots and then its own, mainly flying single-engine biplanes. It started transcontinental service and created a system of lighted airways, in conjunction with the Commerce Department, to permit night flying. In 1925, with the routes well established, it started shifting mail delivery to contract airmail carriers. "Which is another name for an airline," van der Linden says.
It still wasn't profitable to fly passengers, but by the early 1930s, Postmaster General Walter Brown was working on that, too. He wanted the airlines to make money so he wouldn't have to subsidize airmail delivery. Brown "was not the most agreeable person," van der Linden says, "but man, he knew what he was doing." By revamping the airmail contracts-he lowered the rate of payment while encouraging the carriers to expand the system-he doubled the air routes at no extra cost. He also "cajoled the airlines into acquiring better equipment" by offering subsidies "for flying larger aircraft, safer aircraft, with multiple engines, two-way radios, for being able to fly at night." Impatient with the rate of progress, Brown "brought all the airline operators together here, in the old Post Office Building, fifth floor, and read them the riot act" about getting new planes.
The result? "Passenger service increased from about 6,000 people in 1930 to about 450,000 people in 1934." And bigger, faster, safer airplanes-like the one we're looking at now-got built.
The DC-3 was the first passenger aircraft capable of turning a profit without carrying mail. "It's just hugely important," van der Linden says. "It was ubiquitous. It was everywhere." It's also startling, when you stop to think about it, how much this pinnacle of 1930s design looks and feels like a modern airplane. "Obviously the technology, particularly in the engines and aerodynamics, has changed drastically. But we still make an airplane out of aluminum and we rivet it together. It's still a tube, and the fuselage sits on top of the wings."
Even an engineering triumph like the DC-3, however, was a transportation option primarily for the well-to-do. Airplanes cut the coast-to-coast travel time from three or four days to one, but fares were still too high for most Americans to afford except on rare occasions. It took the introduction of the jet engine to commercial aviation in the 1950s-and the vastly more efficient airliners that resulted-to really shrink the globe for the middle class.
We take it so entirely for granted now, the idea of being able to get anywhere on the planet in less than a day, that it's hard even to list the changes the transportation revolution produced. Air and Space curators tend to laugh when you ask them to do this. Then they start talking about the homogenization of the country and the world, the breakdown of geographically based community, the multinationalization of commerce and industry, and, of course, the tragic removal of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants to Los Angeles and San Francisco. (This actually happened a year before domestic jet service, van der Linden points out, but basing teams thousands of miles from their opponents was possible only because "airlines had finally developed long-range piston aircraft that could fly nonstop.")
The British and the Soviets developed the first passenger jets, but these had too many bugs to succeed. Thus the commercial jet age truly began, van der Linden argues, with the Boeing 367-80, a one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft that first flew in 1954. The museum owns the Dash 80, as it is affectionately known, but we can't see it on this tour; there won't be room for anything that big until an additional Air and Space facility near Dulles International Airport gets built. Groundbreaking is scheduled for next month, though the money hasn't all been raised yet; the opening is projected for the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' flight.
If you happen to be in Seattle, however, and can talk your way into Boeing's old Plant 2, where the Dash 80 is being restored, you can walk through this immediate precursor of the Boeing 707-the airplane, van der Linden says, that "really, truly introduced jet travel, certainly to the United States and, practically speaking, around the world."
You'll see that it looks a lot like the jets we fly on today, though its brown and yellow paint job has faded, its instrument panel is not computerized, and the foam rubber cushion on the copilot's seat is held in place by duct tape.
You'll also learn that it wasn't initially designed as a commercial airliner.
Boeing, in the early '50s, was still primarily a builder of military aircraft, including the B-47s and B-52s of the Strategic Air Command. To complete their mission, which was to deliver nuclear devices to the enemy's homeland in case of war, these jet-powered bombers had to be refueled in the air. But there were no jet-powered tankers to do this.
It seemed only logical to fill this need. If civilian demand followed-as it soon did, when Pan Am started shopping for a passenger jet-so much the better. Then Boeing's gamble would really pay off.
Four Hours Over Tokyo
"Ba-ba! Ba-ba-ba! Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!" The boy looks to be about 10 years old. He leans over the second-floor railing above the Air Transportation gallery, both hands cocked, and sprays the crowd below him with imaginary gunfire. His mother finally drags him off, but not before he's underlined an essential connection. The history of flight is inextricably bound up with the reinvention of war.
We've had glimpses of this all along, but it's time to confront the linkage directly. So let's head for the World War II gallery and gather in the doorway. We can admire the enormous Boeing B-17 that Keith Ferris has painted on the back wall-"Fortress Under Fire," the mural is called-while we bring the military narrative up to date.
In the earliest days of aviation, the airplane's potential for good or evil was often seen as an all-or-nothing proposition. Optimists thought the new technology might end war forever, either by breaking down international borders to promote understanding or by proving such a fearful weapon that no sane nation would risk its use. Pessimists, who doubted that sanity would prevail, predicted airborne apocalypse.
World War I proved an inadequate testing ground for these hypotheses. Military aviation was too new a concept, the airplane itself was too primitive, and the unprecedented horrors of trench warfare overshadowed everything else. Still, the war made it clear to many that air power-in one form or other-was going to be the next big thing.
Which is where the B-17 comes in.
The Ferris mural features one of the famed four-engined "Flying Fortresses" in the air near Wiesbaden, Germany, in August of 1944. Along with three other bombers flying in formation below, it is under attack by Nazi fighters and antiaircraft batteries. You can see the deadly black puffs of flak against the blue summer sky, and you can imagine the courage it took for the B-17's 10 crewmen to fly through it, without fighter escorts and hundreds of miles from their base, long enough to unload their bombs and hightail it for home-then turn right around and do it again.
What you may not be able to imagine, because the B-17s have become such a potent symbol of the American contribution to Hitler's defeat, is how close we came to not building them at all.
In the 1930s, when funds for all things military were scarce, there was a fierce struggle between advocates of long-range "strategic" bombers like the B-17 and cheaper, shorter-range aircraft that many deemed adequate for our needs. The B-17 program was nearly scuttled when pilot error caused a prototype to crash in an early test. Bitter Army-Navy rivalries, plus the regular Army's suspicion of the upstart Army Air Corps, nearly wrecked it as well. Only the dramatic intervention of President Franklin Roosevelt-who saw what the mere threat of German air power had accomplished at Munich in 1938-got the production lines geared up in time.
All this adds up to a heroic story line, with farsighted leaders and brave airmen teaming up to help defeat the evil Nazis and the brutal militarists of Japan. We don't call World War II "the last good war" for nothing. And yet . . . Let's look once more at that Keith Ferris mural. Anybody notice what's missing?
Yes, of course.
There's not a hint of what happens once the bombs are released.
The history of strategic bombing in World War II is complex and deeply contentious, so it's important to make a couple of things clear in advance. There is no need to point fingers or assign blame in order to grasp the magnitude of the change it represents. Nor is it required that you question the overall justness of the Allied cause.
A few definitions may also be helpful. The "tactical" use of air power involves supporting traditional military operations on land or sea. It was crucial to victory in World War II (more so than strategic bombing, perhaps, though we don't have time get into that debate here). Air power's "strategic" use, by contrast, implies an assault on the enemy's fundamental ability to wage war. It seeks to smash the infrastructure that supports armies and to destroy a nation's will to fight.
Strategic bombing can be divided further into "precision" bombing, which means targeting, say, factories and railroads, and "area" bombing, which means going straight at population centers. These distinctions are always cleaner in theory than in practice. But it was the emergence of area bombing-this newfound ability to obliterate whole cities and the people in them-that truly changed the nature of war.
One of the most shocking things about this transformation was the suddenness with which it took place. There had been attempts at strategic bombing by both sides in World War I, but the technology really wasn't there yet. There were scattered outbreaks of area bombing in the 1930s-by the pro-Franco forces in Spain, the Italians in Ethiopia and the Japanese in China-but these were loudly abhorred as uncivilized aberrations.
In 1937, the State Department denounced the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities as "contrary to principles of law and of humanity." In 1938, including the Spanish bombing in its condemnation this time, it called such behavior "barbarous." In 1939, after war broke out in Europe, President Roosevelt issued a plea for the belligerents to exercise restraint. "The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population," he wrote, "has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity."
Fast-forward 51/2 years. Germany's major effort at area bombing, the famed London blitz, has proved nightmarish but ultimately ineffective. The surprise Japanese tactical air strike on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor (remember Top News Story No. 3) has brought the United States into the war. An Allied bombing campaign of increasing ferocity and dubious precision has ravaged Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin and many other German cities. And on the night of March 9, 1945, the U.S. Army Air Forces have unleashed the B-17's successor, the B-29, to firebomb Tokyo from low altitudes-killing some 88,000 people and wounding 41,000 more, according to a very rough American estimate, in a single four-hour raid.
In those four hours, one Air Force general will later assert, there were "more casualties than in any other military action in the history of the world." They were mostly civilians, of course.
The night was unusually windy, and after less than half an hour of the incendiary bombardment, writes historian Ronald Schaffer in Wings of Judgment, Tokyo residents saw the initial conflagrations "coalesce into a mass of fire . . . By now crowds of people, some of them screaming, were plunging through the city. The fire storm quickly roasted those who stayed in under-house shelters . . . superheated air burned their lungs . . . Residents hurried from burning areas with possessions bundled on their backs, unaware that the bundles had ignited. Some women who carried infants this way realized only when they stopped to rest that their babies were on fire."
We don't think that much about the Tokyo bombing anymore. The spotlight of history is trained on what came next. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not so clear a break from the past as a blue-sky mural can make them seem.
Athens 1, Sparta 0
"Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins," the fast-talking docent in the blue blazer is saying. And there it is at last: the answer to our moon-landing pop quiz.
We're back in the Milestones gallery again, and the docent is standing in front of our next stop, the Apollo 11 command module, addressing a crowd of maybe 30 folks wearing ball caps that say "Korean War Veteran" and assorted New York Yankees gear. He says they're looking at "the good ship Columbia"-the astronauts got to name it themselves-which was hurled into space on July 16, 1969, by a three-stage Saturn V rocket he calls "the most successful large-scale object ever built by human beings." He tells them how, once Columbia was in lunar orbit, Armstrong and Aldrin squeezed into the landing module Eagle and headed down to take that first giant step for mankind. He notes that for the 20 hours they were gone, Mike Collins-the member of the trio you're most likely to have forgotten-was left to circle the moon alone.
It's an awe-inspiring story, no matter how many times you've heard it. It's also the story the National Air and Space Museum is best-equipped to tell. A few years back, however, as the curators were getting ready to redo the Space Hall exhibit, they realized they had a significant problem on their hands.
Everyone knew that men had landed on the moon. Hardly anyone understood why.
"Going to the moon didn't just happen in 1969 because it was time to go to the moon," explains space history curator Valerie Neal. But the artifacts couldn't fill in the narrative by themselves. "We had a variety of objects that really weren't talking to each other and just a sense of intellectual clutter down there . . . We had the lander within view of military rockets and there was no connection made between those at all."
"We wanted to get people to understand," says Neal's colleague Martin Collins (no relation to the Apollo astronaut), "that this was a historical process that came out of a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. And that that particular confrontation gave shape to just about everything you see in that gallery."
To those of us who lived through that four-decade face-off, the frame of reference should at least be familiar (though we tend to be weak on details). But to the increasing number of museum visitors who weren't out of diapers when the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War might as well be the Peloponnesian War. Tell us again, Daddy: How did Athens and Sparta end up sending people into space?
Here's how:
Immediately after World War II, as a section of the revised exhibit called "Military Origins of the Cold War" explains, the Americans and the Soviets started eyeing each other nervously. The Americans had the atomic bomb and the long-range bombers to deliver it. The Soviets had neither, but that situation didn't last. And long before they even got the bomb, they'd decided that intercontinental ballistic missile systems, not airplanes, were the best way to deliver it.
Both sides made good use of captured German rocket technology, but by the early '50s, the Soviets had pulled ahead. The Air Force still wasn't buying the ICBM argument-there were doubts that missile guidance systems would ever work well enough, and besides, who needs 'em? We've got B-52s! In the meantime, however, nuclear weapons were getting so much lighter and more powerful that you didn't need such accurate guidance anymore: Five miles from the target would do just fine. And then along came President Eisenhower-who feared the social and economic consequences of an oversized military establishment-with a plan to cut back conventional forces and build up a nuclear deterrent instead.
"More bang for the buck," some clever phrase-maker dubbed Ike's idea, and by 1954, American ICBM development had taken off. The opening shot of the space race was still three years away, but on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the essential groundwork was laid.
We can't say that the Cold War arms race made the space race happen-historical causality is a slippery customer, and there were too many other things that contributed as well. But we're on pretty safe ground if we call it a necessary precondition. "There's no conceivable way in the 20th century that we would have gone to the moon without that military investment," is the way space history curator Michael Neufeld puts it.
"You don't get a human inside a spacecraft," says Neal, "until you've researched reentry vehicles. And the reentry vehicles that were being researched were warheads."
The Space Race gallery is closed for window repairs, unfortunately, but you can find a quite satisfying version on the museum's Web site (www.nasm.si.edu). There you'll be reminded how the Soviets stunned the planet on October 4, 1957, by launching Sputnik I, the first-ever artificial satellite, into orbit. The ability to deliver nuclear weapons was an obvious and threatening subtext. (A model of Sputnik hangs in the Milestones gallery; it looks like an anodized basketball with rabbit ears.)
You'll see how we responded by setting up NASA as a civilian space agency-the idea was to contrast American openness with Soviet secrecy-and at the same time developing the top-secret Corona spy satellite program, which we needed to see how far behind we really were when it came to ICBMs. You'll recall that President Kennedy (who got himself elected, in part, by hyping a "missile gap" Corona's photographs would prove never existed) decided in 1961 to counter a string of Soviet space achievements with a crash program to send Americans to the moon. And you'll marvel, as Valerie Neal does, that we got there in just "the span of one human lifetime" after the Wright brothers flew.
One of Apollo's great legacies, Neal says, was "the single image of Earth as seen from lunar distance"-the ability to view the planet, suspended in galactic darkness, looking lovelier and more fragile than we'd ever seen it before.
The Big Bang and the Primordial Fireball
To understand how the 20th century totally altered our point of view, however, we need to get a long way past the moon. So our next stop had better be the Einstein Planetarium, where historian of astronomy David DeVorkin is holding forth about the night sky.
"Now let's really move out deep," DeVorkin says as he shifts his pointer toward the top of the artificially starry dome. "This is the constellation of Andromeda, and within that constellation is the furthest thing we can see with our unaided eyes." He's talking about that tiny smudge of light over there. "It's at a distance of over 2 million light years. That means light traveling at 186,000 miles a second takes 2 million years to get to us from that little patch of light."
But that's not what's special about it, as he later explains.
Nope. That particular smudge of light in Andromeda is the reason "we lost any hope of having a central position in the cosmos."
All this is Edwin Hubble's doing, which is why NASA named a space telescope after him. In 1924 Hubble was a young astronomer on the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, scanning the known universe with what was then the largest telescope in the world. Space was a much smaller place back then, DeVorkin says. "At the beginning of the century, galaxies didn't exist. We were in a universe of stars." To be sure, Copernicus and Galileo had long since proved that everything didn't revolve around us, that we were just tiny creatures on a planet circling the sun. "But the general idea was that the sun was, if not at the center, pretty close to the center of this huge pinwheel of stars."
Observing that smudge in Andromeda-it was known as a "spiral nebula," and the sky was full of them, but nobody knew what they were-Hubble discovered that it contained something called a cepheid variable. This is a type of star that "dims and brightens in a predictable cycle" (as the draft script for a new astronomy gallery DeVorkin has been helping put together describes it). For reasons too complicated for a liberal arts type to explain, astronomers knew how to use cepheids as a kind of "cosmic yardstick" to measure distance in space.
Anyway, when Hubble found that cepheid in the Andromeda nebula, he was able to calculate the nebula's distance-and he discovered that it was way, way too far off to be part of the cluster of familiar stars we call the Milky Way. It was nothing less than a separate galaxy, with billions and billions of stars of its own-and so were all those other spiral nebulae out there.
So at the same time the airplane was radically shrinking the globe, astronomy was expanding the universe in literally unimaginable ways. "The scale of it is beyond human comprehension," DeVorkin says.
But wait-it gets worse. Because the scale wasn't the only thing about the universe that changed.
Five years after Hubble had convinced his fellow astronomers that galaxies exist, DeVorkin says, "he convinced the scientific community that they're all moving away from one another-that the universe is not static. He wasn't the first one to see that, but he was the first one to realize what it meant consistently on a global scale . . . He was the right guy at the right time, with the biggest telescope in the world."
In five years, then, we went from a static universe made up of individual stars to a rapidly and infinitely expanding universe made up of an unknowable number of galaxies. "And then out of that, primarily out of theory, theoretical considerations, came the Big Bang and the primordial fireball, if you want to call it: some kind of process when time didn't mean what it means today." Nobody will ever know exactly when the Bang banged or the fireball fired up, for the simple reason that "time didn't exist when it happened, whatever it was that happened." But never mind. Just about everybody believes that something did.
"That's the master narrative," DeVorkin sums up cheerfully, "and what we've been doing, for the better part of the 20th century since then, is filling that master narrative in."
Got that?
Good.
Let's move on.
'That's Not My Department,' Says Wernher von Braun
But where should we move on to, in a museum whose own master narrative-however compelling-has not been filled in enough to explain the historical moment in which we find ourselves?
Air and Space hymns the march of technology and progress, the irresistible force of American arms, the triumph of human ingenuity and will. This should come as no surprise, given its mandate to "memorialize the development of air and space flight." Yet with only a modest shift in perspective, a visitor can conjure the ghosts of more ambiguous story lines.
Take, for example, the coming of the atomic age. To consider this one, we might want to assemble near the locked door of Gallery 103, behind which still rest the various components of the Enola Gay that finally made it onto display in 1995, in a radically downsized exhibition stripped of meaningful context.
The original exhibition script, you may recall-which had invited museum visitors to consider both the necessity and the consequences of the 1945 atomic bombings-was withdrawn after a vehement attack by the Air Force Association sparked a widespread public outcry. Talk about different perspectives: The opposing sides in the Enola Gay brawl barely spoke the same language. Defenders of the planned exhibition cited the opinions of people like conservative press baron Henry Luce, who argued in 1948 that the war could have been ended "without the bomb explosion that so jarred the Christian conscience." Yet to a group of congressional critics, no consciences could possibly have been jarred, because the Hiroshima bombing was "one of the most morally unambiguous events of the 20th century."
Or take our painful discovery that American power has limits. For this, we'll need to move upstairs to the Sea-Air Operations gallery and stand in front of the Douglas A-4C Skyhawk, one of the few reminders in the whole museum that there even was a war in Vietnam.
Peter Jakab once tried to remedy this situation. "I spent about four years developing an exhibition gallery," Jakab says. "The organizing principle was the notion of multiple perspectives and how that can shape alternate points of view of history." Visitors were to walk down a C-130 transport ramp into a detailed evocation of air power's numerous applications in Vietnam. They were also to explore the ways five American perspectives on the war-those of political leaders, military leaders, the media, the civilian population and individual soldiers-evolved from the early to the late stages. But after the Enola Gay blew up, then-Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman said uh-uh, no more controversial topics right now, please.
But perhaps the most significant story Air and Space fails to confront directly, though it jumps out at you from just about every gallery if you're looking for it, is the post-World War II entrenchment of Big Government.
Ask an Air and Space curator to name the major historical themes the museum's collections evoke, and there's a good chance he or she will start by talking about how, over the last six decades or so, the federal government took on the central role in "the marshaling of technical, human, economic and industrial resources toward common goals," or how it required government intervention to "muster large amounts of treasure and people and skills to build these technologies." Curators point to the "massive, large-scale logistical and organizational effort" that it took to win World War II, and to the lesson both government and industry drew from its success: that if you threw money, will, technology and the best and brightest scientists at a problem-as we did, say, with the Manhattan Project-you could do anything.
There are a lot of different tag lines for the social and political restructuring that resulted. "Big government" is the simplest, if the least precise. President Eisenhower called it "the military-industrial complex," warning that public policy could easily "become the captive of a scientific-technical elite." Air and Space curators tend to shy away from Ike's term-it's too politicized now, and it also leaves out universities, a key component in the mix-so they substitute phrases like "the contract state" instead. Walter McDougall's Pulitzer-winning history of the space age, The Heavens and the Earth, calls it "technocracy."
"Ours is an age of perpetual technological revolution," McDougall writes. While it's true that government played a role in boosting 19th-century technologies, it was the 20th century's all-encompassing brand of warfare that "finally established state-sponsored and -directed R&D as a public duty and necessity. Rapid development of new weaponry, ersatz strategic materials, and more productive manufacturing processes became an imperative of national survival in total war."
McDougall is not sanguine about this development. He sees Sputnik, which sparked a "media riot" over America's alleged scientific backwardness, as the point where Eisenhower's rearguard battle against technocratic excess was lost. Apres Ike le deluge: His successors promptly succumbed to "the technocratic temptation," and a "strange alliance between the social activists and the military activists" produced a barrage of expensive domestic programs; a vastly accelerated nuclear arms race (with the space race serving as a kind of protective coloration); and, of course, the technocratic hubris of Vietnam.
There are good reasons, even beyond the obvious political ones, why Air and Space lacks a Hall of Technocracy. The concept is too abstract and sprawling to get across cleanly (you'd need miles of wall labels). And if you tried to tell the story through a central figure-that time-honored trick used by feature writers and museum curators to make complex issues more digestible-you'd distort reality by making your chosen subject seem too important. We're talking about a quintessentially collective phenomenon, after all.
But what the heck. Let's give it a whirl.
Over in the Space Race gallery, dwarfed by the displays of missiles and NASA hardware that dominate the room, is a ruler-shaped object that you might not even recognize if you're under the age of 25 or so. It's a slide rule that belonged to Wernher von Braun. As much as any other individual, von Braun was responsible for getting Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins to the moon. A tireless evangelist for American space exploration, he led the NASA team that developed the Saturn V, and as curator Neal explains, he exemplified "the kind of engineer-manager mastermind behind this technology development" who "interfaced with the political environment to nurture it along."
Von Braun's skill in managing technology projects, however, was acquired in Germany, where the army missile he helped nurture was the V-2 and the political environment with which he interfaced was the Third Reich. To look back at his astonishing career is to grasp both the triumphs and the terrors of the 20th-century technocratic enterprise.
As a teenager from an aristocratic Prussian family, von Braun become obsessed with the idea of space travel. But he quickly realized, as Michael Neufeld writes in The Rocket and the Reich, that "the daunting task of building a complicated liquid-fueled, gyroscopically guided missile" could be accomplished only with military funding. So he signed on to work with the Army Ordnance Office in 1932, a year before the Nazis came to power. Von Braun and his fellow enthusiasts saw no problem with this. "Our feelings toward the army," as he later put it, "resembled those of the early aviation pioneers, who, in most countries, tried to milk the military purse for their own ends and who felt little moral scruples as to the possible future use of their brainchild."
Five years later, he was technical director of the Peenemunde Experimental Center, a lavishly funded and staffed new test facility where-with some help from university labs and corporations-German rocketeers worked to perfect what the army hoped would be a decisive new weapon. Von Braun proved himself a brilliant engineering manager, though the V-2 itself turned out to be a strategic mistake for the Nazis. Vast quantities of scarce resources were diverted to produce a missile that killed between 5,000 and 6,000 people, mostly civilians in Belgium and England, but had no significant effect on the course of the war. Many more people died building it than from its use; the notorious V-2 assembly plant at Nordhausen relied on slave labor from concentration camps.
But the V-2's potential was clear, and even before the Germans surrendered, the Allies were racing to snatch up the engineers who'd built it. Von Braun and the bulk of Peenemunde's rocket team fell into the hands of the U.S. Army, which shipped them back to the States and put them to work making missiles for us. The rest is history: the kind of history to which the phrase "Faustian bargain" is frequently attached, and which inspired a Tom Lehrer tune that the older among us may recall:
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Unfair? You be the judge. "The same thing would have happened at Peenemunde without me," von Braun told Daniel Lang of the New Yorker in 1951, nine years before he and his team moved from the Army to NASA. "Rockets were a new idea, and a new idea is stronger than one man's feelings." Most likely he's right. The airplane, too, would almost certainly have been invented by someone even if the Wrights had stuck to bicycle design.
Yet it's hard to overestimate the significance of the rocket team's technocratic brainchild, a carefully restored example of which you can examine in the Space Race gallery when it reopens. Like its American counterpart, the Manhattan Project, Peenemunde was a prototypical military-industrial-scientific effort that gave birth to a miracle of technology. When the two miracles were mated, well . . .
"Technology offers millions a chance to investigate the higher aspects of life," von Braun told Lang. "But you don't get something for nothing. There are strings attached to that chance."
Space and Cyberspace
It all seems so long ago now, doesn't it? Sputnik. Apollo. The Cold War.
Technocracy's still with us, of course, and we're still spending billions on missiles. Life's a giant game of Space Invaders, we're told, and we'll be toast if we can't knock rogue rockets out of the sky.
But who pays attention to this?
Air travel is mundane. Space flight is history. The Saturn rocket program was canceled even before we reached the moon. Von Braun's masterpiece was so enormous, expensive and slow to launch that it had no practical military application.
Meanwhile, the National Air and Space Museum itself is starting to feel just a little out of touch, like one of those musty dioramas of Life in Prehistoric Times. (Look, Ma, there's a Saber-Toothed Flying Tiger and an X-20 Dyna Soar!) We're a fickle species with a famously short attention span-and it's cyberspace that fires our imagination these days.
Time for one last stop, then.
Let's head up to the Beyond the Limits gallery, where aeronautics meets the computer age. A few yards from the entrance, we'll find a plexiglass-covered cylinder, perhaps four feet in diameter. It's the guidance system from a Minuteman missile with its electronic innards exposed. (Memo to Bill Gates, Part II: On second thought, you should be supporting this museum. Because without the Minuteman guidance system, you might be working for IBM.)
"People think Bill Gates invented it, you know?" Paul Ceruzzi is saying. Ceruzzi is an Air and Space curator and the author of A History of Modern Computing-he's the guy who put the guidance system on display-and by "it" he means the key technology behind the computer revolution. He's talking about the primal Silicon Valley creation myth, in which this life-enhancing technology springs fully grown from the foreheads of heroic nerds with names like Gates, Jobs and Wozniak, all working out of tiny West Coast garages without a trace of help from the hopelessly anti-entrepreneurial federal government.
Well . . .
Bear with me. Some actual history is essential here.
The Minuteman is a three-stage solid-fuel missile that became America's standard ICBM in the 1960s. It got its name from the fact that-unlike a liquid-fuel rocket-it could be fired almost instantly, at a target determined in advance.
The first Minutemen were deployed in 1962, but already a shift in American nuclear strategy was forcing the Air Force to think about a new, improved version-one with enough computing power in its guidance system so you could change its target immediately before launch. The trick was to do this without adding weight, because more weight would make the missile too expensive even by Defense Department standards.
Around this time, Ceruzzi says, a couple of guys named Jack Kirby (at Texas Instruments) and Robert Noyce (at Fairchild Semiconductor) were just coming up with something called an "integrated circuit." Forget all those transistors and resistors and whatnot that had to be manufactured separately and wired together on a circuit board. Now the whole thing could go on a single silicon wafer! Manufacturing was going to be hell, though. The assembly line would have to be preternaturally clean (a single speck of dust would ruin everything), and there were numerous other problems to be solved before silicon chips would be cheap enough to find a market.
The only way a company could make chips profitable "was to have a huge production line churning these things out by the millions," Ceruzzi explains. In the boom-and-bust electronics market of the '60s and '70s, however, "nobody was going to invest in that kind of a production line, because they had been burned so many times with unsold product. They just said, `No way, it's too risky.' " But then "along comes the Air Force, and says, `If you make them, we'll buy them.' And they say, `Okay, we'll build a production line.' Once you build the production line, you can just churn the stuff out, which is what they do."
Pretty soon, NASA began ordering integrated circuits for the Apollo program. Between the Minuteman and the moon shot, the government was buying just about every chip manufactured. By 1964, as my Washington Post colleague T.R. Reid wrote in The Chip, his book on the digital revolution, "the initial manufacturing base was in place, and the integrated circuit started flying down the learning curve with the speed of a lunar rocket in reentry."
But what if the government hadn't come along and created a market for this new technology? What if it hadn't demanded a more flexible bang for its bucks? Would that mean no $10 calculators? No Sony Walkmen? No VCRs? No home computers?
Ceruzzi isn't sure he wants to go that far. Counter-factual arguments are impossible to prove. Chips are such great technology, he says, that it's entirely possible they would have broken through without the government boost-though almost certainly at a more modest pace. And yet . . .
They might not have, either.
"You have to always be very cautious, as a historian, to say that there's an inevitability to history," he says. "It just doesn't happen that way." Without the government boost, what looks to us in hindsight like the obvious technical superiority of the chip might not have been good enough. "Just like the Betamax VCR was not good enough, or the Macintosh was not good enough, to prevail in the marketplace."
No one will ever know.
As Ceruzzi talks on, I can't help expanding the question to include all the stops on the Air and Space tour. What would our lives be like today without the invention Orville Wright once compared to the discovery of fire? Without DC-3s and 707s; without B-17s and the Enola Gay; without shifting galaxies and permanent technocracies; without the programmable death machine we're standing in front of right now?
No cyberspace? No silicon chips?
Paul Ceruzzi's got an answer to that one, at least.
"Somebody could have come up with something better!" he says.
Bob Thompson is a staff writer for the Magazine. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Monday on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
-------- MILITARY (by country)
Western Leaders Face Trial in Belgrade Monday: Spectators sit behind empty chairs reserved for President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the start of the trial in Belgrade.
Fox News
Monday, September 18, 2000
http://www.foxnews.com/world/091800/yugoslavia.sml
It looks like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair won't be taking a moonlit cruise on the Danube anytime soon: Both are facing an angry judge at a trial in Yugoslavia for war crimes they allegedly committed during NATO's air strikes last year.
The alleged crimes have cast a wide net, ensnaring Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder - a total of 14 leaders of the Western world.
But unlike the protracted legal battles Clinton has faced in the U.S., Yugoslavian justice was moving quickly to condemn and convict.
The trial is already under way and is expected to wrap up by Sept. 24, the day of Yugoslavia's presidential and parliamentary elections, in which President Slobodan Milosevic - who was indicted for war crimes in Kosovo by the United Nations in May - is seeking a second term.
It took three hours Monday for District Public Prosecutor Andrija Milutinovic and his deputy to read the list of charges of war crimes the defendants allegedly committed during the March-to-June bombing.
"They are charged with inciting an aggressive war ... war crimes against civilian population ... use of banned combat means, attempted murder of the Yugoslav president ... the violation of the country's territorial integrity," the charges sheet said.
Mr. President, You'll Get a Fair Trial
To ensure the accused receive fair trials, the government has appointed an attorney for each defendant. But with none of their clients present to assist in their own defense, the attorneys face an uphill battle. The mounds of documents introduced as evidence make the Starr Report look like a pamphlet.
Presiding Judge Veroljub Raketic said there was six times as much material available elsewhere, and prosecutors said it would take four days to present all the evidence.
The accused face sentences of up to 20 years in prison if found guilty. Justice Minister Dragoljub Jankovic said that based on the evidence, he expected maximum sentences to be meted out.
"The question is how the sentence will be carried out. As the international community's stand on our country is changing, I believe some of them will one day be extradited," Jankovic said, according to the independent Beta news agency.
According to the charge sheet, the accused "fired 600 cruise missiles and made 25,119 (air) sorties during the 78-day aggression, attacking both military and civilian targets, killing and wounding many people, causing mass destruction of property."
The prosecutor read out the names of 503 civilians, 240 soldiers and 147 police who he said were killed during the bombing, which NATO launched to halt Belgrade's violent attacks on Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority.
Court officials also read out statements made by the accused Western leaders that prosecutors said support the charge that they were inciting war. Films of NATO attacks on Yugoslav targets were shown as the officials read out survivors' testimonies and forensic reports.
Regardless of whether the testimony will lead to Clinton or the 13 other western political leaders doing time in a Serb jail, the accounts nonetheless served as a poignant and tragic reminder of the horrors that have ravaged the former Yugoslavia.
These testimonies included a mother whose daughter was killed in the Montenegrin village of Murino where she had been sent for safety, and a rescuer relaying how a girl in flames died in his arms as he took her out of a wrecked train.
NATO insisted throughout the campaign that it was aiming only at military targets and took all possible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. However, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said in February that 500 civilians had been killed by the air strikes.
NATO has acknowledged that the Humans Rights Watch report contained legitimate criticism but maintains that NATO's actions could not be compared with the Serb violence in Kosovo.
-------- drug war
U.N. Forsakes Effort to Curb Poppy Growth By Afghans
New York Times
September 17, 2000
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/17/world/17AFGH.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 15 - Frustrated by declining support from Western donors and the indifference of the ruling Taliban, the United Nations is winding down efforts to persuade farmers in Afghanistan, the world's largest producer of opium, to switch to alternative legal crops.
Ghorak, Khakrez and Maiwand, three districts of Qandahar province where the United Nations set up pilot programs promoting alternative crops, have recorded decreases in poppy cultivation of at least 50 percent, according to the latest annual survey of the United Nations International Drug Control Program.
"This demonstrates that the alternative development projects work very well," the program's executive director, Under Secretary General Pino Arlacchi, said here. Similar programs in Bolivia and Peru, he noted, led to sharp declines there in the cultivation of coca, the plant used to make cocaine.
But despite United Nations efforts to convince Afghan farmers to switch to wheat and other food crops in return for compensatory improvements in their lives, Mr. Arlacchi said, "Afghanistan remains by far the largest opium supplier in the world."
Now, with United Nations funding running out and opium still Afghanistan's leading cash crop, the pilot projects will end this year, Mr. Arlacchi said, "given lack of financial and political support."
Afghanistan's production of opium, the essential raw ingredient of heroin, was estimated at just over 3,600 tons this year, a decline from the record 5,100 tons in 1999.
But the drop was caused mainly by a severe drought in southern Afghanistan and not by any effort by the Taliban to make peasants grow something other than opium poppies. A previous decree that farmers reduce their areas under opium cultivation by one-third has been widely ignored by the farmers and the Taliban authorities.
Half of Afghanistan's opium is consumed as heroin by addicts in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, Mr. Arlacchi said. The rest is smuggled out to heroin markets in Europe, usually via Turkey and the Balkans.
Afghanistan planted nearly 203,000 acres in opium poppies this year, a slight decline from last year, again apparently because of bad weather. United Nations officials hoped that the drought might encourage some farmers to revert to traditional crops. But the poor harvest may leave indebted farmers with no choice but to keep raising opium.
Opium growing is encouraged by Afghanistan's rugged, often remote terrain and a long-running civil war that has bred lawlessness and defiance of authority.
Afghan farmers can earn about $14 per pound of opium, considerably more than they do from other crops, United Nations officials say. Roughly 10 pounds of raw opium are used to produce 1 pound of heroin. At the consuming end, the cost of a pound of uncut heroin in Europe or the United States can exceed $40,000.
Opium poppies are grown in 22 of Afghanistan's 32 provinces, but 6 provinces in the south account for 92 percent of the opium producing area. Moreover, 97 percent of this land is irrigated, proof that precious water is diverted to opium poppies at the expense of other crops.
The Taliban, a militant Islamic movement that fought its way into power, controls an estimated 91 percent of the Afghan villages visited by United Nations surveyors, compared with 9 percent controlled by opposition forces in the north. But the Taliban's territory contains 96 percent of the country's opium poppy fields, up from about 90 percent last year.
Mr. Arlacchi visited Afghanistan three years ago and secured assurances of cooperation from the Taliban, which considers drug use contrary to Islamic precepts, at least in theory. Since then, he said, "There was no substantial improvement in our relationship."
The United Nations drug control office will continue its annual survey of Afghanistan's opium cultivation and harvest yield, conducted by Afghan nationals who have been able to move about the country and interview opium growers and local officials.
The United Nations has also encouraged a cordon by Afghanistan's neighbors - Pakis